Kelly McParland: Western temporizing shifts the momentum in Syria and leaves Assad a happy man

Western temporizing shifts the momentum in Syria and leaves Assad a happy man

Deep in whatever redoubt he keeps himself safe from his people, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad must be feeling relatively good about himself.

More than 90,000 people are dead and almost two million have fled to neighbouring countries, but the Syrian President is still in his job, sort of, and the tide of the civil war for which he is responsible has shifted in his favour. According to the New York Times:

In recent weeks, rebel groups have been killing one another with increasing ferocity, losing ground on the battlefield and alienating the very citizens they say they want to liberate. At the same time, the United States and other Western powers that have called for Mr. Assad to step down have shown new reluctance to provide the rebels with badly needed weapons.

Ground has been regained and a semblance of control asserted in the northern semi-state Assad has carved out for himself. The rebels may hold sway in 60-70% of the actual territory, but 60% of the population lives in the smaller patch still held by Mr. Assad. And the rebels’ lack of unity, paired with their failure to provide the services or security expected, is costing them the sympathy of ordinary Syrians.

The same people who were predicting Mr. Assad’s imminent demise are now bewailing his staying power. Samantha Power, nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, blamed the Security Council for failing to act, and called it “a disgrace that history will judge harshly.” The slaughter, she said, is “one of the most devastating cases of mass atrocity” she has ever seen.

Just the day before, UN officials themselves said the crisis is the worst since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which the UN and western powers notably failed to prevent the slaying of more than 500,000 people.

The High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, and the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Ivan Simonovic, said 5,000 people are killed every month, while 6,000 flee the country every day for refuge in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.

“The extremely high rate of killings nowadays – approximately 5,000 a month – demonstrates the drastic deterioration of the conflict,” Simonovic told a UN session in New York.

The UN envoy to Iraq, Martin Kobler, warned that the battlefield in Syria was merging with growing violence in neighbouring Iraq, — where 3,000 people have been killed in the last four months — creating one big cross-border war pitting Islamic factions against one another.

“These countries are interrelated,” Kobler stressed. “Iraq is the fault line between the Shia and the Sunni world and everything which happens in Syria, of course, has repercussions on the political landscape in Iraq.”

None of the lamentations have moved western powers any closer to a more determined effort to halt the bloodshed. Current hopes rest on vague plans for a peace summit backed by Russia, which is Syria’s chief ally and arms supplier. Britain and France, which were calling for increased arms shipments to the rebels, have shown no sign of shipping them since the European Union made it possible by lifting its arms embargo.

In any case, the retiring head of Britain’s army says the only viable solution would be to launch a western-backed invasion.

“If you want to have the material effect that people seek you have to be able to hit ground targets and so you would be going to war if that is what you want to do,” General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, told The Telegraph in a pre-retirement interview.

A no-fly zone, as advocated by Republican Sen. John McCain and other critics of the Obama administration’s strategy, wouldn’t be sufficient to slow Assad, said Sir David.

“You have to be able, as we did successfully in Libya, to hit ground targets.

“You have to establish a ground control zone. You have to take out their air defences. You also have to make sure they can’t manoeuvre – which means you have to take out their tanks, and their armoured personnel carriers and all the other things that are actually doing the damage. “

Noting that there is “a great reluctance to see Western boots on the ground in a place like Syria,” he added that, while Assad’s supporters are of united, his opponents aren’t.

“There is a lack of international consensus on how to take this forward,” he said. “We are trying to cohere the opposition groups, but they are difficult to cohere because there are many different dimensions to them.

“So it is work in progress, so I am very clear in my military advice to the government that we need to understand what the political objective is before we can sensibly recommend what military effort and forces should be applied to it.”

That’s a (relatively) diplomatic way of saying the West is divided, confused, unwilling to take on military risk and ineffective in the half-measures it has attempted instead. Much as it was in failing to deal with the Rwanda crisis.

Power, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the role of the U.S. and UN in the world’s biggest genocides, maintains Assad will still get his comeuppance.

“History shows that regimes that brutalize their own people in that manner, that totally force it, their legitimacy, that do not abide by even basic norms of human decency, they just do not have the support to sustain themselves,” she told the committee. “So the day of reckoning will come.”

It’s not clear what history she’s referring to. If the recent example of Rwanda is any indication, it seems more likely western powers will continue to temporize until it’s too late to help, if it isn’t already.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.